In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile messaging services (e.g. text and/or multimedia) and data communications.
Broadcast messaging services, enabling the sending of mobile messaging service messages to large numbers of mobile devices, are increasingly used to send notifications to large numbers of subscribers. Examples of such notifications include advertisements, notices relating to users' accounts, and alerts. For example, subscribers to an alert system of a public transportation authority may receive mobile messaging service messages related to service disruptions for a particular subway line. Similarly, subscribers to a campus security alert system may receive mobile messaging service messages related to campus security alerts. In both cases, each mobile messaging service message is broadcast instantly to all subscribers of a particular messaging service. As a result, users subscribing to multiple mobile messaging service alert services are likely to be overwhelmed by large numbers of alerts on their mobile devices. Also, users who are not in the vicinity of a location associated with the alert, but who still subscribe to the alert service, will still receive all notifications even though the alerts are not currently relevant to them. A need therefore exists for a system that selectively provides to a user broadcast messages that that are relevant to the user, for example based on the user's location, profile and sender filtering criteria to send the messages to the mobile users.
An alert system for broadcasting mobile messaging service messages alerting users about imminent threats to life or property has been discussed for development. The proposed alert system is configured to send alert messages to all mobile devices located within an extended geographical area, such as the coverage area of multiple mobile base stations, and cannot limit the geographical area to a finer granularity. This alert system further is configured to send the alert message to all mobile devices located within the area, and therefore does not allow broadcast messages to be provided only to selected mobile devices. In order to ensure that mobile devices having entered an area have received the alert message, the alert system requires that the alert re-broadcast at regular intervals to all mobile devices located within the area. The inability to send the message to particular devices results in the messages being sent to all devices, thereby creating excessive network traffic and negatively affecting battery life on the devices.
A need therefore exists for a messaging service that allows broadcast messages to be sent only to devices located within geographical areas defined with a high-level of granularity. A need exists for a messaging service to send broadcast messages to selected mobile devices. A need further exists for a messaging service that identifies mobile devices having entered a geographical area, in order to send a broadcast message only to those mobile devices having entered the geographical area.